1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to an improved data processing system and in particular to an improved method and system for manipulating graphic objects. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to an improved method and system for manipulating graphic objects and updating data structures.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data may be manipulated in many ways in a modern state-of-the-art data processing system including: data accessing, data encoding, data communications, data compression, data conversion, data entry, data exchange, data filing, data linking, data locking, data manipulation, data mapping, data modeling, etc. The large amounts of data that are available to the user of a modern state-of-the-art data processing system often become overwhelming in magnitude and complexity. These situations often may arise in the creation and execution of documents in a graphic user interface (GUI) employing windows.
Data processing systems are capable of communicating information to users in many formats, such as text, graphics, and sounds. Many times a user will create a graph to present information from various sources, such as spread sheets, word processing documents, and data bases to provide a coherent and comprehensive presentation to the user. A graph may be represented by a number of different components. For example, a bar in a bar graph may be represented by a single value or by an equation defined by two or more variables. In some cases, a user may desire to edit or alter the graph to determine how changes in different components of the graph will affect other components. Presently, a user must change or alter values for the various variables at the data structure containing the values for the variable the user desires to change by utilizing another program such as a spread sheet program or a database manages to change the values. As a result, a user often has to perform a number of complicated manipulations in order to change the graph. Such manipulations may become cumbersome and confusing when a large number of variables make up a graph.
Therefore it would be advantageous to have a method and system for providing a user an efficient way to manipulate a graph that is defined by a number of different variables.